by Ann Cleeves
‘Brace could be making all this up,’ Charlie said. ‘For a bit of attention, or to get you to go soft on his daughter, or just to make mischief, have a bit of a laugh at our expense.’
‘Well, there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there? We need to track down Robbie Marshall. Whether he’s alive or dead.’ They were all scattering now, but she called for their attention for one last time. ‘One more thing. Let’s have a bit of discretion here. No need for the boss to know we’re digging around. Not until we’ve got something to tell him.’
They nodded. Her team. She could have sung with joy.
Chapter Four
Patty Keane woke to her six-year-old switching on the TV in the room below her. Somehow, he’d figured out how to put on Netflix and there was a cartoon he was obsessed with. There was always some obsession or other, but this one had lasted for months, and the music that went with the Super-Rabbit hero whizzed around her brain and made her want to scream. She knew she should get up, turn down the TV so the neighbours didn’t complain again, make sure the kids had their uniform, fix the packed lunches. Like last night she knew she should make sure they’d had a bath before they went to bed, make sure Archie’s sheets didn’t still smell of piss and that Jen had brushed her teeth. She’d seen the perfect families on the telly and she watched the perfect parents in the playground, talking about swimming lessons and the price of houses. But her life wasn’t like that. It was as though she lived in a different universe. She knew she’d never be able to match up. Not these days. Not without Gary.
When she woke again it was eight-thirty and Jen was standing by the bed, already dressed in her school uniform. The shirt collar was grey at the neck, but you wouldn’t notice unless you got very close. Jen was twelve and in the comp now, though, and she was sensitive about things like that.
‘I’ve made their lunches but I’ve got to go. I’ve had one late mark already this week. You’ll have to shift your arse and get them to school.’
‘Okay.’ If she’d been well, Patty would have said something about the language. She’d been properly brought up. But today even that was too much effort. She rolled out of bed, pulled on a sweatshirt over the vest she wore as a pyjama top, a pair of jogging bottoms. She was going to ask Jen to stick the kettle on, but she heard the front door bang as the girl went out.
Downstairs another episode of the cartoon was just starting. The children had scavenged something for breakfast. Patty had been feeling a bit better yesterday and had managed to get to the shop. Jonnie was almost dressed, but was plugged into his tablet. She knew without checking that it would be a YouTube video and that young American men would be swearing. Jonnie had been named after his grandfather, who’d bought them this house on the new private estate on the outskirts of Kimmerston. Patty had been a couple of months pregnant with the boy, and she and Gary had thought all their dreams had come true. The purchase had gone through just before the old man had been sent to prison, but he still managed to send them enough to keep them going.
Archie was sitting in his underpants fixated on the television, his lips moving silently to the words of the theme song.
She switched off the TV and cajoled them into school clothes, only losing it with Jonnie at the last minute when he was trying to pull his jersey over his head while the earplugs were still in. Got them out of the house with minutes to spare and felt a moment of triumph because they arrived in the playground just before the bell went. Moments like that could buoy her up for half a day. Often she went back to bed when she’d got them to school, but today she thought she’d have a bath and tidy up a bit. Maybe put a load of washing in the machine. The weather was nice and it would dry on the line. It was only when Patty got back to the house that she found the boys’ packed lunches on the bench and it was suddenly as if the world was crumbling around her again. There was a minute when she thought she was strong enough to go back to the school. She could drop the lunches in the office. The receptionist was kind enough. But they looked so meagre, so pathetic. Not in proper lunch boxes but in supermarket carrier bags. And she’d get the lecture about applying for free school meals, and she’d smile and nod, knowing she’d never get round to filling in the forms; and anyway, wouldn’t they find out about the money that appeared like magic in her account every month? She knew it was from her father and he was in prison, wasn’t he? So it was probably dirty money and she might end up in court just for accepting it. Patty stood in the kitchen, with its sticky floor and dishes piled in the sink, and she began to cry. Sometimes she felt that these days all she did was cry.
When the tears stopped, she remembered she hadn’t taken her pill yet and went upstairs. Pushed it out of the bubble pack and swilled it down with water from the sink in the bathroom. Then took another because she was feeling so rotten. The doctor had said only to take two at night, but sometimes she couldn’t face a whole day without the slightly dreamy feeling that two pills gave her. Tonight she’d just take the one and then she might wake up a bit brighter. She put the kettle on for tea, wiped down the surface of the bench, thought she still had time to remake the lunches and get them to school in time. But not yet.
She’d made it through to the front room with the tea, had fallen onto the sofa and just wondered if there was an episode of The Real Housewives she could watch, when the doorbell rang. She ignored it. Most likely it would be the neighbours moaning about the kids again. She could understand that it must be hard for them. Patty wouldn’t want to live next door to a family like hers. But the bell rang again and she looked through the net curtains that the previous occupants had left behind. Sometimes she had fantasies of Gary turning up, clutching a bunch of flowers or a bottle of champagne, saying it had been a dreadful mistake leaving her and the kids and asking if they could start again.
But it wasn’t Gary. It was a big woman with a dreadful frock and a green fleece. She could be collecting for charity. Or she could have escaped from the local loony bin. A couple of extra stone and twenty years or so, and Patty might look like her, if she didn’t pull herself together. It was a sudden, sobering thought. Then the woman took her phone out of the fleece pocket and dialled a number. Patty’s phone, a cheap pay-as-you-go, was sitting on the mantelpiece. It began to ring, and that freaked Patty out altogether. She answered it. ‘Hello.’
‘Is that Patricia Keane?’ It was a local voice and she didn’t sound mad.
Patty had a sudden thought. ‘Are you from the social?’ Sometimes the social workers made unannounced visits. Usually it was Freya, a nice enough kid, but sometimes they were strangers.
‘Good God, no.’ The woman sounded horrified. She moved towards the window. She must have known Patty was looking out. ‘Do I look like a social worker?’
‘No.’ Patty didn’t like to say she looked more like someone in need of social-work help.
‘I’m an old colleague of your father’s. Your birth father’s. Are you going to let me in? I feel a bit daft, standing out here on the doorstep when you’re on the other side of the wall. Besides, I could murder a cuppa.’ Then she turned to the window and gave a little wave in Patty’s direction.
So Patty went to open the door. She’d always found it was easier to do as she was told. Or to pretend to. And the fact that the fat woman was so scruffy made her less intimidating. She was the right age to be one of the playground grandmas, but she wouldn’t have fitted in there any more than Patty did.
Patty took her through to the kitchen, partly because it was a bit tidier in there – she hadn’t managed the washing up yet, but she had wiped down the bench – and partly because the woman had asked for tea. There wasn’t anywhere to sit. It wasn’t like the kitchen in her adoptive parents’ house, with its scrubbed pine table and sofa against one wall. They both stood, waiting for the kettle to boil. The woman had very round, brown eyes.
‘Your dad asked me to look in on you,’ the woman said. Then she gave an apologetic smile. ‘But you don’t know who I am! You must think I’m daft,
turning up on your doorstep without any warning. My name’s Vera – Vera Stanhope.’
Patty was none the wiser. The pills had really kicked in now and this whole encounter seemed unreal. The kettle boiled and she made tea, pleased that the kids had left a bit of milk in the fridge. They stood leaning against the bench and Vera sipped at the drink. Usually the social workers refused, as if they might catch germs just from being in the house. Or they pretended to drink, tipping the liquid down the sink when they thought Patty wasn’t looking. That was even worse.
‘He’s worried about you and the kids,’ Vera said. ‘He wants to know if you’re coping all right.’ Not really expecting any answer. ‘Look, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had any breakfast and I bet you’ve not had time for much, with three bairns to get ready for school. I saw there was a caff in that row of shops on the way into the estate. Why don’t we wander over there? It’d give us a bit of fresh air too. My treat.’
Patty found herself pulling on her trainers and walking over the patch of green where the kids played after school, listening to Vera talk about what a lovely summer it had been. The cafe was quiet, the breakfasts over and the lunchtime rush not yet started. It seemed out of place on the edge of the new estate, old-fashioned, a place for workers, not for the yummy mummies or the ladies who lunched. Vera asked Patty what she fancied. ‘I’m going for a bacon sandwich. My doctor would have a fit, but what does he know?’
‘I’m veggie,’ Patty said. Her adoptive parents had been veggie and she still couldn’t bring herself to eat meat.
‘Scrambled eggs on toast then?’ Vera passed on the orders to the guy in the grubby apron behind the counter. ‘And a pot of tea for two.’ She seemed to realize Patty was in no state to make her own decisions.
They had the place to themselves and sat by the window. Patty wasn’t worried about being seen from outside. None of the playground parents would come to this side of the green, which was all still social housing. The kids from here went to another school.
‘So why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?’ The tea had arrived and Vera sat with her hands clasped around the thick china mug. ‘I never knew your dad had a daughter.’
‘I don’t think he knew. Not for sure. Not until I tracked him down after I got married.’ Somehow Patty found herself telling the story about being adopted when she was a baby and taken to the big house on the coast, but never really feeling she be-longed there. ‘They were kind, you know, my mother and father, but I always felt somehow that I disappointed them. They were both teachers and they wanted me to do well at school, but I was never a top-of-the-class kind of kid.’
‘Do they keep in touch?’
Patty waited to reply because the food arrived and suddenly, with the plate of eggs in front of her, she was hungry. Vera was squirting tomato ketchup on her bacon roll and seemed in no rush, either.
‘When I said I wanted to track down my birth parents, I could tell they were a bit hurt, but they were okay about it. They’ve tried to keep in touch, honestly, but Gary never got on with them and we kind of drifted apart. They retired not long ago and moved south – they both came from Surrey and never really settled up here.’ And they wanted to move away from me and the kids. They wouldn’t have thought that was what it was about, but they wanted an excuse to let go. That had never occurred to Patty before, but now she thought it, it was true. ‘They phone and they send presents for the kids. Birthdays and Christmas.’ Patty still thought she had a lot to be grateful for and she wasn’t going to slag them off. They’d adopted her, hadn’t they? Helped her escape from care.
‘How did you find your dad, John?’
‘It took a bit of work, and sometimes I didn’t bother for a few months. I couldn’t find my birth mother and, though there was nothing official, the social worker thought she’d died.’ A pause. ‘A heroin overdose. She was an addict. That was why she couldn’t look after me and put me into care. But my father was named on my birth certificate, and in the end the social worker put us in touch. I wasn’t sure he’d want to see me. They’d told me he was a police officer. I was married by then. Jen was in nursery and Jonnie was on the way. Gary had set up his own business, and work came in fits and starts. My dad bought us that house. A lovely semi on a nice estate. We couldn’t believe it.’ But perhaps moving to Hastings Gardens was where it had all started to go wrong. There was that sense of not belonging, all over again.
The woman seemed embarrassed to ask the next question. ‘Did your dad explain how he and your mam got together? A cop and an addict. It seems a bit weird.’
Patty couldn’t help smiling. ‘He said she was beautiful and he’d fallen for her the moment he saw her. He was married, though, and he knew it was never going to work out. But he’d never had kids and he was pleased when she fell pregnant. He was even more pleased when I got back in touch with him.’
‘A real fairy story.’
Patty wondered if the woman was being sarcastic but, when she looked up, Vera only smiled back at her.
‘I should get back to the house,’ Patty said. ‘I need to drop the boys’ packed lunches into the school.’ Knowing she’d probably not get round to it, but feeling a bit jittery now, needing the sofa and something mindless on TV.
‘Tell you what, pet. Why don’t we buy a couple of sandwiches and some buns to take out from here? We can drop them at the school on the way back to your place. Save you coming out again, if you’re not feeling too good.’
So Patty sat in the cafe window while Vera made all the arrangements, and she wondered what it would have been like to have an adoptive mother like this woman. Scruffy and big, fumbling in her bag for her change. Instead of sleek and well-groomed and competent at everything.
Chapter Five
Vera could remember when this part of Kimmerston had been mostly allotments; to the east of the allotments there’d been a couple of rows of pitmen’s cottages, with the 1930s council houses beyond. The cottages and the gardens had gone, the site developed for housing, but the council estate was still there, most of the better homes in private ownership now. Patty’s place in Hastings Gardens still looked very new in comparison, with its raw red brick, but the garden was a mess with its pile of rusting toys, and the front door already needed repainting. The neighbouring houses were immaculate. Vera didn’t go back in after they’d dropped the sandwiches at the school. She stood by the car and waved to Patty until she’d gone inside, then drove slowly away.
She was trying to work out what she felt about Patty. Usually Vera was no sucker for a hard-luck story; her own childhood had been lonely, and Hector had seemed incapable of giving affection or praise. Her mother had died when she was a very young child. But Patty seemed lost. She must be in her mid-thirties but seemed hardly more than a child herself, skinny and frail. Bonny enough, if you looked beyond the lank hair and the greasy skin. Perhaps she took after her birth mother, the beautiful addict who had captured the heart of John Brace. If you believed the fairy story that the detective had peddled to his daughter. Vera wondered if Hector would have cared enough about her to bribe an old enemy to keep an eye out for her, and she arrived back at the police station without having reached any conclusion.
* * *
She pushed open the door to the office shared by her team and found everyone working. All summer it had felt like a student common room. There’d been aimless banter, sporadic periods of concentration, the occasional food fight. Now there was an air of purpose. It was the equivalent of exam time. They looked up as she came in, but turned back to their computers without more than a nod of greeting. They knew she’d tell them what she’d got from Patricia Keane when she was ready.
She let herself into her own box-like office and shut the door. This was her space. The window looked onto the blank wall of the Magistrates’ Court next door and then down to the street. No view, freezing in winter and roasting in summer, but in an era of open-plan and hot-desking, she clung onto it, and had threatened that if they
took it away she’d resign. She hung her fleece over the back of her chair and switched on the kettle in the corner of the room, made instant coffee. Black, because she couldn’t be bothered to fetch milk from the fridge in the staffroom. She switched on her computer, saw the endless list of unread emails and ignored them. Instead she looked for the number of the social-services office that covered Hastings Gardens and eventually tracked down a social worker who’d had dealings with Patty and her kids.
‘Freya Samson, safeguarding team.’
‘Inspector Vera Stanhope, Northumbria Police. It’s about the Keane family.’ Vera drank the coffee and thought she should get her filter machine repaired. Or buy a new one.
‘Is there a problem?’ The young woman sounded stressed. Maybe her summer hadn’t been so quiet and the last thing she needed was one of her cases to blow up.
‘I was hoping you’d be able to tell me that. What’s your involvement with the Keane family?’
‘I’ll need to phone you back,’ Freya said. ‘Check out who you are.’
‘Tell you what: I can come over and see you. I’ll have my warrant card and we can have a proper chat. It’s always better to talk face-to-face.’ Vera paused, in an effort to come up with a phrase that might persuade. ‘We’re all supposed to be working with our partners these days, aren’t we?’ She wondered if she could use ‘stakeholders’ in another sentence, but Freya already seemed suitably convinced.
‘I’m in a child-protection meeting at twelve. It would have to be before that. Or later this afternoon.’
‘I’ll come straight over.’ Vera replaced the phone and wondered what she was doing. Chasing ghosts. Or finding a project to keep her team motivated after a sleepy summer.
* * *
The social-services area office was based in a concrete-and-glass tower block on the edge of town, not very far from the Hastings Gardens estate where Patty lived. Vera had once been allocated a social worker. The woman had turned up after Vera’s mam had died; she’d been intimidated by Hector, or impressed by him, and never returned. Perhaps that had coloured Vera’s attitude to the profession. Perhaps that was why she felt this ache of sympathy for Patty. As she waited at reception for Freya to appear, she thought you’d have to be a brave soul to stray into here. Everything was shiny, especially the women behind the desk in the lobby. It could have been one of a chain of smart American hotels.